I find the fact that a child could go missing for 4 years very distressing. It took a community policewoman responding to a complaint about nappies being thrown over a fence two minutes to realise something seriously wrong was going on. How did this terrible woman escape detection for so long?

Holey I agree. We have some awful cases in the news at the moment and a lot of anger being misdirected at social services. I have a few SW friends and I know that they routinely deal with families like these, teetering on the edge. The ones they deal with are the ones where the children remain relatively safe. These unfortunate little ones slipped between the cracks.

There will probably always be incompetent parents. SW will always be needed. They will not always get it right.

What I can't stand is the extended families (ie the dad of little Hamzah, the older brother etc) blethering on about how they tried to get SW and police interested, how they knew this was going to happen, and blaming social services.

Surely, as adults in the entourage of the poor little mite, as the flipping relatives, they could have basically taken over the situation, gone to house, demanded to see the child, taken him away and fed him and alerted the authorities. I rather hope that even they didn't know how bad it really was- if they did then they're almost as guilty of neglect as the mother herself. In fact the older brother did know. He even knew his brother was dead as apparently he was baby-sitting the night the child died. I bet the dad knew he was dead as well- how could a late teenager keep something like that to himself and deal with it? The older brother will surely have told him. Which I guess is why they didn't pursue the matter of the little one's whereabouts and welfare.

I have a whole bunch of questions:the older children were all school aged. Were they attending school? Did their mother ever take them? Did she ever take their poor little brother with her? Did nobody look at the child and notice that he seemed pinched and tiny at best?

Frankly, given that all the older children all seem to have survived, I'm surmising that Hamzah did in fact have some kind of medical problem that meant he was more vulnerable than his siblings. I'm not saying the mother looked after her other children well (she almost certainly did not) but they all seem to have survived so there must have been some food in the house. She was however ridiculously gung-ho about a child with enormous health problems. The mother says that the child did "from natural causes". What the stupid bat fails to understand apparently is that starvation is rarely what actually kills people- it's the diseases enabled by a weakened immune system that kill. A child that malnourished could have been carried off by the common cold.

This disgusting woman, I say that because she disgusts me but so do the others involved in this, was an alcoholic, with 8 children, living in an absolute hovel , was abused by the father of some/all of her children.

5 children living in that house were school aged, can you imagine that not one of them noticed or said anything about their baby brother?

The sad excuse of a father, who was charged with a domestic violence incident against this woman, is just as guilty as she is. So is the elder brother charged with failure to dispose of a dead body, I mean, what the hell goes through the minds of these people?

This is a sad reflection on a very small section of society. There were mistakes made along the way, by the police, social services and midwives/her GP (she was struck off from the surgery for not attending appointments.) but at the risk of going all Daily Mail, how are such dis functional families able to keep breeding and being paid for by the state?

Thank goodness for the policewoman who had the tenacity to keep going back and trying to gainaccess. Sadly too late.

Oh God, I know. I was thinking about this case last night when sorting out some of DS's old baby clothes for a charity shop. His body was found dressed in a 6-9 month babygrow when he died as he was so stunted and malnourished. DS is 20 months, and those size clothes looked tiny next to him. For a four year old to fit in one....